New York City has hired the architecture-and-design firm Perkins Eastman to study where and how to build jails that would eventually replace those on Rikers Island, which officials are working to shut down in the next decade.

Four firms submitted proposals for the project, city officials said.

Perkins, which was awarded the $7.6 million, 10-month study, will determine whether current jails could be expanded and propose locations for new, more modern jails. The process also will involve talking to neighborhood groups, looking at the environmental impact and thinking about design, said
Elizabeth Glazer,
director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

“A critical part of that is thinking about jails not as a place that is on an island, hidden from all lives, but as part of the ebb and flow of neighborhoods and considered civic assets,” Ms. Glazer said.

For example, a jail in San Diego is filled with light and has soft furniture and glass, she added.

Perkins Eastman will study three existing jails, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and identify new sites, including in the Bronx, city officials said. The current city jail in the Bronx is on a barge in the East River, which officials say they can’t expand. City officials say they aren’t looking to build a jail on Staten Island.

Among the 17 subcontractors for the project are the Osborne Association, a criminal-justice nonprofit, and RicciGreene Associates, an architecture firm that has worked on jail facilities in New Haven, Conn., and Denver, among others.

City officials say that shutting down Rikers Island, which has long been plagued by violence, is part of creating a smaller, fairer criminal-justice system. They have previously said the city jail population needs to shrink to 5,000 from almost 9,000 today in order to shut down the complex.

Perkins Eastman, which is based in New York City, has also worked on projects including the Port Authority Bus Terminal, DREAM Charter School in Harlem, courthouses in Brooklyn and the TKTS booth in Times Square.

“We’re used to doing large, community-driven, complex projects but I think this is a very unique challenge for us, for anybody,” said
Nicholas Leahy,
a principal at the firm.